Justice in Iraq: The court that convicted Saddam shows temperance towards his henchman

Justice in Iraq. WSJ Editorial
The court that convicted Saddam shows temperance towards his henchman.
WSJ, Mar 04, 2009

When Saddam Hussein was hanged in December 2006, critics of the Iraq war -- and even a few supporters -- took it as proof of everything wrong with the "new" Iraq: sectarian, vengeful and crude. Never mind that if the death penalty has any application, it is for mass murderers like Saddam.

In fact, Saddam's hanging was, along with the surge that began the following month, a turning point for Iraq: Among other things, it signaled to the Baathist bitter-enders and their Sunni supporters that there would be no going back. But the critics were wrong in another respect too. Witness Monday's acquittal of Tariq Aziz, by the same court that convicted Saddam.
Mr. Aziz became Iraq's foreign minister and deputy prime minister when Saddam seized power in 1979. Unlike such colleagues as "Chemical" Ali Hassan al-Majid, Mr. Aziz did not oversee the regime's various mechanisms of repression. But he was as complicit in their crimes as another notorious foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was complicit in Hitler's.

The postwar Nuremberg trials -- well-remembered for their probity and fairness -- sentenced Ribbentrop to death, and he was hanged in 1946. In acquitting Mr. Aziz of charges of involvement in the 1992 summary execution of 40 merchants, the Iraqi tribunal showed a considerably greater degree of mercy. Mr. Aziz remains on the hook, and in prison, for other charges. But in acquitting him now, the court has done something rare in the annals of Arab justice, and demonstrated again that the Iraq the U.S. liberated is worthy of the world's respect and support.